What is the relationship between the individual, family, and society? In what way is a person responsible to society for his or her actions? How does what goes on in families affect society as a whole?
These are important questions, for we live in a world that places great emphasis on the value of individual freedom. At the same time it seems to downplay taking responsibility for the results of one's actions and the impact an individual's actions may have on others.
For instance, since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, we have been told that sexual love is a private matter that is no one else's business. But is it? Does what individuals do in private have an impact on the society in which they live?
Indeed it does. Society pays the price for the deeds of individuals. After all, society is only a large group of individuals. Just as one cancer cell in the body can affect the whole body, an individual's actions for good or bad have some impact on the body of society.
We may think, "Why shouldn't I do what I want sexually? I’m not harming anyone but myself. What I do in the privacy of my own home with another consenting person is nobody's business." Yet if individual choices lead to unwanted pregnancies, sexual diseases, divorce, and family breakdown, as they so often do, those choices do become society's problem and society's business.
The Princess and the Barbarian
The story “The Princess and the Barbarian”, written by author George Gilder as a prologue for his book Men and Marriage, addresses these issues. Upon reading the story, look at the difference in behavior between the two generations. The virtues of the new generation differ from those of the previous one. The courtship and sexual morality of the first couple contrast sharply with the behavior of the second couple. The story reveals the social consequences of these different value systems.
In the first generation, there is a barbarian who is young and aggressive. He is undisciplined and seeks instant gratification in whatever he does. He takes what he wants without regard for the consequences. When he encounters a young princess, he is filled with lust and desire for her.
She, however, is modest and guards her virginity and integrity with her life. Through her love and strength, she helps the barbarian become self-disciplined and transforms his lust into love. He finds the motivation to change, grow, and give up his barbarous ways for the sake of her love. He changes from a wild man to a husband, a father, and eventually he becomes the new king. As head of the kingdom, he lives for its benefit and future, bringing in an era of peace and prosperity. This story tells us that sexual purity in a woman can "tame" a barbarian man into acting well—into becoming a committed husband, a good father, and a "ruler" of his household if not a kingdom. If the woman had given in sexually, the barbarian would never have been tamed by her. He would not have become a husband. He would not have become a good father. He would not have become a responsible ruler.
In the second generation, there is another barbarian. This barbarian is like the first was at the beginning—aggressive, undisciplined, and seeking self-gratification. However, this princess, the daughter of the first, has different values from her mother. She has been influenced by modern ideas. She doesn't care for her parents’ morality, and when she meets the barbarian she welcomes the excitement of the encounter, but she is not committed to their relationship. It would take too much effort for her to tame him. She prefers just to enjoy pleasure with him without thinking of the responsibility that goes with it.
When a suave, worldly-wise king from a neighboring kingdom appears at the court, she is attracted to him immediately. Why stay with a barbarian when she can have a king? And the barbarian? His heart betrayed, he begins seeking revenge, wreaking havoc on the kingdom and driving it into ruin.
This is a parable of how sexual immorality leaves men in a barbarous state. The barbarian is not transformed into a husband, father, and ruler. Rather, he is simply used and then abandoned for someone better. He then goes on a rampage.
The moral of the story
This story tells us that the virtues practiced or not practiced by individuals have a definite impact on a society's future. A society is made up of the relationships among the people of that society. If these relationships become selfish, then the whole society will be affected. This is especially true if such behavior is demonstrated by those in a position of influence, such as a member of the royal family or a nation's elected leaders.
The cover of a major news magazine in the United States showed a large portrait of then President Clinton and his wife Hillary. The words read, "Nobody's business but our own." The news magazine cover was referring to the sex scandal surrounding the president and Monica Lewinsky, a White House worker, which was storming the country at the time.
Was it really nobody's business but their own? Consider. President Clinton had lied to a grand jury about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. Ordinary citizens who lie to juries are put in jail. President Clinton had also ordered military strikes on other countries on the eve of important days in the scandal: the night before Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony and the night before he was to be impeached. Many Americans questioned the timing of these strikes—were they meant to serve as distractions from the president's political troubles? Many people from other countries saw the military strikes as a way to distract attention from the scandal.
The president's actions also affected the trust that some of the members of his own armed forces felt in him. A colonel in the United States Air Force said, "If I had done what he did, I would have been fired. Yet I had to obey him as my Commander-in-Chief." Some Air Force cadets said, "If one of my leaders here couldn't be loyal to his own wife, how could I trust that he would be loyal to me in a combat situation where my life might depend on him?"
Did the president's personal immoral decisions really only affect him and his wife? Was it really "Nobody's business but their own"?
If people betray the trust of those closest to them, they are likely to betray the trust of other people as well. If we are prepared to cheat on those we are close to, why not cheat on our casual acquaintances or those with whom we do business? Betrayal lack of trust, grounded in human selfishness, are at the root of many our social problems.
The story of the princess and the barbarian is not only about the effects that royalty or people in positions of power have on society. It is also a story of how sexual self-control strengthens a society and how lack of sexual self-control hurts it.
Anthropologist J. D. Unwin studied the sexual behaviors of eighty-six cultures through five thousand years of history. He observed that when cultures believed that sex outside of marriage—either premarital sex or extramarital sex—was wrong and did not practice it, those cultures prospered and were strong. The societies that were more sexually loose declined and eventually faded away. Unwin theorized that it was a matter of energy. Energy dispersed carelessly through promiscuity resulted in a dying society. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin at Harvard found a similar pattern in his studies of societies. Thus there is a strong scientific link between personal moral decisions and the strength of a society.
Family Life and Society
How we handle our sexuality in a society determines a great deal about the stability of marriage and family life in that society. Many social scientists have found that unstable marriages and family breakdown lead to crime in society. Neighborhoods where there are many single parents are usually less safe than neighborhoods where there are strong marriages. Most criminal offenders are unmarried young men (from age eighteen to age thirty-five).
When men marry and stay married, they, like the first barbarian, become stakeholders in society. They care about their families. They get into fewer fights, they drink less alcohol, fewer of them are involved in homicide, they keep steady jobs for the sake of their wives and children, they care about the schools, hospitals, roads, and facilities in their communities and pay taxes and serve on committees to make them better. They often own property and care about their property. Their sexual energy is channeled into building a marriage, a family, a home, and a community in which to live and prosper.
This is the significance of the story of the princess and the barbarian. Through channeling the couple's sexual energy into marriage, family, and kingdom-building, all is well. All are happier for the couple's sexual restraint.
When sexual mores are loose in the society, they contribute to social breakdown. Loose sexual mores contribute to divorce. Then children grow up in broken families, often with only one parent. This will have a negative effect on the larger society, because children from broken families are statistically far more at risk than children from stable families. Children from broken families statistically use drugs more, have more mental and emotional problems, are more involved in crime, suffer from health problems, fall behind academically, and are more likely to be victims of abuse. Children of single parent families tend to be less able to cope with emotional and social difficulties. Although this is not true in every case, they are more likely to grow up feeling insecure, neglected, and unloved as the single parent struggles to maintain the home while working full time to support the family as well. Such children are exposed to the dangers and problems of the world before their hearts have been grounded in the warmth and security of a loving home. Because they often spend time alone in an empty house, they are more likely to join a gang, which becomes like a family to them.
These things do not always happen to children from broken homes, but they do face greater challenges and have more difficulties to overcome than those growing up in stable homes with two loving parents.
The quality of family life is enormously important to society. Children who do not experience respect and love in the family will not know how to show respect and love to people in society. In an atmosphere of love, children can learn to love and trust, to apologize for mistakes, to forgive others for their mistakes, to resolve conflicts, to be conscientious and courageous, to respect the rights of others, to postpone gratification, and to be both free and responsible. They can gain the inner confidence to develop healthy relationships with many kinds of people.
We often think that our problems are caused by the social environment. Of course, it is true that social influences can affect us in both good and bad ways. Yet the family is the basis of society. When we find problems in society, they can usually be traced back to problems in the family. It is in the family that our personality and character are formed. We do not inherit just our parents' genes; we also inherit their attitudes towards life, their way of dealing with problems, and their patterns of human relationships. These are passed on from generation to generation.
The relationships we experience in the family are the models for our social relationships. Our societies are a reflection of our families, and our families are a reflection of the moral choices made by the individuals within them. In these ways the fates of the individual, the family, and society intertwine.
Lesson Plan Objectives
Cognitive: Students will understand that individual moral choices affect families and society.
Affective: Students will not like the modern princess and will understand that more security and happiness came about when the first princess maintained her morality.
Behavioral: Students write a short story recreating in modern times the story they study. Students will compare and contrast the two princesses in the story. Students will compare and contrast the two princesses’ impact on the kingdom.
Class Session 1
Materials Needed: Pictures, newspaper articles, magazine articles, Internet information on Prince Charles and Princess Diana [or William and Kate, or another royal couple].
Ask students what they thought of the story “The Princess and the Barbarian” in their student books. Even though the story has “fairy tale” elements, do they find a certain basic truth behind it?
The book cites some scientific research—from anthropology and the social sciences—that an individual’s moral choices—especially in the area of sexuality—do have an impact on society. Ask students if they remember any of the points made in the text and to share what they remember with the class.
Ask: “Is it only leaders—like princes and princesses and presidents—whose individual moral choices affect the nation?” Emphasize that a nation is made up of individuals, and is only as good as the moral choices those individuals make.
To make the point that individual choices affect the whole, ask students what happens to a school as a whole if some students vandalize it. Maybe it is only one or two students who spray-paint a wall, break a window, plug up the toilets with rolls of toilet paper, or scatter marbles in a slippery hallway. Still, isn’t everyone affected? Isn’t the atmosphere of the school affected? Those individuals have an impact on everyone in the school because of their poor choices. It is the same with individual moral choices in a nation.
Point out that the story “The Princess and the Barbarian” makes the point that the second princess has different morals than those of her mother. Have they noticed a difference between the morals of their generation and the morals of their parents’ generation? Ask: “What are some of those differences? Which generation do you think has it right? Or does each generation have some things right and some things wrong? What are those things?”
Ask students to look at the Questions for Discussion in their student books. Allow them time to pen notes in their books as to their answers to these questions. Then conduct a class discussion, soliciting students’ answers to each of the ten questions and encouraging students to respond to one another’s ideas.
Questions for Discussion
1. Why do values sometimes change from one generation to the next?
2. What should a traditionally moral society do when immoral ideas start influencing the youth?
3. How is it possible to choose between a moral and an immoral idea? What are the criteria for making such a judgment?
4. How does the breakdown of order in sexual love influence society? Is it a strict cause-and-effect relationship?
5. Why do you think most criminals come from broken homes or single-parent families?
6. How do an individual's choices affect his or her family?
7. How does a family affect society?
8. How did the first princess act to change the barbarian into a responsible adult? How did her actions and the result differ from her daughter’s?
9. The couples in the story happened to be the kingdom’s rulers. Do leaders have a special responsibility to set the moral tone of their society?
10. Why do you think the second princess rejected the values of her parents and adopted more “modern” ones?
Perhaps it would be interesting to discuss the case of a contemporary royal situation and its impact on society: Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Students are probably familiar with some elements of the story. Show pictures and share from articles about the couple. What impact do students think this unhappy marriage had on society? Did sexual immorality have anything to do with the unhappiness in this marriage? What about Charles’s subsequent marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles? Even though legally she will be queen when Charles becomes king, the British do not call her “Princes Camilla” and they will not call her “Queen Camilla” because of the strong feelings among the British people that her love affair with Charles led to the death of the beloved Diana. Did the individual moral choices of these individuals—Diana, Charles, and Camilla—affect their nation?
Class Session 2
Remind students that in the last class session, they discussed Charles and Diana, a more contemporary prince and princess, whose actions impacted their country and indeed the world.
Ask them to do the Reflection Exercise: “The Princess and the Barbarian Today,” perhaps using modern monarchs as their models.
Reflection Exercise: “The Princess and the Barbarian Today”
Try to write a short story transferring the circumstances to the 21st century: where is the “kingdom,” who is the “princess,” who is the “barbarian,” and what happens? Use your imagination to create a modern-day setting for the story.
Point out that most children dream of being royalty at some point in their lives. (Actually, many adults do too!) Using a Venn diagram [two circles that overlap partly in the middle], do this as a class, comparing the older generation princess and the younger generation princess. Write the older generation princess’s unique characteristics in the left circle, the younger generation princess’s unique characteristics in the right circle, and the similarities they share in the intersecting middle portion of the diagram.
Allow students to call out characteristics of the older generation princess, characteristics of the younger generation princess, and the middle ground of characteristics that they shared.
Now draw a chart with two columns, the first with the header: Older-Generation Princess, and the second with the header: Younger-Generation Princess, and ask students to list distinct characteristics of each generation.
Ask students to think of themselves as the prince or princess of a realm. They are confronted with an attractive but wild barbarian of the opposite sex. What do they think they would do?
Exercise: “The Two Princesses”
Make a chart of the two princesses comparing: 1) their values 2) how their actions affected the kingdom
Now think which path you would realistically take if you were to find yourself in their situation (if you are male, let the barbarian be a female). To do this, you have to reflect on your own character and values.
- challenges
- character
- character education
- commitment
- compassion
- conflict resolution
- contentment
- cooperation
- courage
- decision-making
- encouragement
- filial piety
- goals
- gratitude
- healthy families
- healthy lifestyle
- integrity
- kindness
- leadership
- life goals
- loyalty
- marriage
- meaningful life
- moral education
- perseverance
- politeness
- relationship skills
- religion
- respect
- responsibility
- self-awareness
- self-improvement
- service
- sexuality
- social awareness
- sportsmanship
- teamwork
- tolerance
- trustworthiness
ReadingsTable of Contents
These are important questions, for we live in a world that places great emphasis on the value of individual freedom. At the same time it seems to downplay taking responsibility for the results of one's actions and the impact an individual's actions may have on others.
For instance, since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, we have been told that sexual love is a private matter that is no one else's business. But is it? Does what individuals do in private have an impact on the society in which they live?
Indeed it does. Society pays the price for the deeds of individuals. After all, society is only a large group of individuals. Just as one cancer cell in the body can affect the whole body, an individual's actions for good or bad have some impact on the body of society.
We may think, "Why shouldn't I do what I want sexually? I’m not harming anyone but myself. What I do in the privacy of my own home with another consenting person is nobody's business." Yet if individual choices lead to unwanted pregnancies, sexual diseases, divorce, and family breakdown, as they so often do, those choices do become society's problem and society's business.
The Princess and the Barbarian
The story “The Princess and the Barbarian”, written by author George Gilder as a prologue for his book Men and Marriage, addresses these issues. Upon reading the story, look at the difference in behavior between the two generations. The virtues of the new generation differ from those of the previous one. The courtship and sexual morality of the first couple contrast sharply with the behavior of the second couple. The story reveals the social consequences of these different value systems.In the first generation, there is a barbarian who is young and aggressive. He is undisciplined and seeks instant gratification in whatever he does. He takes what he wants without regard for the consequences. When he encounters a young princess, he is filled with lust and desire for her.
She, however, is modest and guards her virginity and integrity with her life. Through her love and strength, she helps the barbarian become self-disciplined and transforms his lust into love. He finds the motivation to change, grow, and give up his barbarous ways for the sake of her love. He changes from a wild man to a husband, a father, and eventually he becomes the new king. As head of the kingdom, he lives for its benefit and future, bringing in an era of peace and prosperity.
This story tells us that sexual purity in a woman can "tame" a barbarian man into acting well—into becoming a committed husband, a good father, and a "ruler" of his household if not a kingdom. If the woman had given in sexually, the barbarian would never have been tamed by her. He would not have become a husband. He would not have become a good father. He would not have become a responsible ruler.
In the second generation, there is another barbarian. This barbarian is like the first was at the beginning—aggressive, undisciplined, and seeking self-gratification. However, this princess, the daughter of the first, has different values from her mother. She has been influenced by modern ideas. She doesn't care for her parents’ morality, and when she meets the barbarian she welcomes the excitement of the encounter, but she is not committed to their relationship. It would take too much effort for her to tame him. She prefers just to enjoy pleasure with him without thinking of the responsibility that goes with it.
When a suave, worldly-wise king from a neighboring kingdom appears at the court, she is attracted to him immediately. Why stay with a barbarian when she can have a king? And the barbarian? His heart betrayed, he begins seeking revenge, wreaking havoc on the kingdom and driving it into ruin.
This is a parable of how sexual immorality leaves men in a barbarous state. The barbarian is not transformed into a husband, father, and ruler. Rather, he is simply used and then abandoned for someone better. He then goes on a rampage.
The moral of the story
This story tells us that the virtues practiced or not practiced by individuals have a definite impact on a society's future. A society is made up of the relationships among the people of that society. If these relationships become selfish, then the whole society will be affected. This is especially true if such behavior is demonstrated by those in a position of influence, such as a member of the royal family or a nation's elected leaders.The cover of a major news magazine in the United States showed a large portrait of then President Clinton and his wife Hillary. The words read, "Nobody's business but our own." The news magazine cover was referring to the sex scandal surrounding the president and Monica Lewinsky, a White House worker, which was storming the country at the time.
Was it really nobody's business but their own? Consider. President Clinton had lied to a grand jury about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. Ordinary citizens who lie to juries are put in jail. President Clinton had also ordered military strikes on other countries on the eve of important days in the scandal: the night before Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony and the night before he was to be impeached. Many Americans questioned the timing of these strikes—were they meant to serve as distractions from the president's political troubles? Many people from other countries saw the military strikes as a way to distract attention from the scandal.
The president's actions also affected the trust that some of the members of his own armed forces felt in him. A colonel in the United States Air Force said, "If I had done what he did, I would have been fired. Yet I had to obey him as my Commander-in-Chief." Some Air Force cadets said, "If one of my leaders here couldn't be loyal to his own wife, how could I trust that he would be loyal to me in a combat situation where my life might depend on him?"
Did the president's personal immoral decisions really only affect him and his wife? Was it really "Nobody's business but their own"?
If people betray the trust of those closest to them, they are likely to betray the trust of other people as well. If we are prepared to cheat on those we are close to, why not cheat on our casual acquaintances or those with whom we do business? Betrayal lack of trust, grounded in human selfishness, are at the root of many our social problems.
The story of the princess and the barbarian is not only about the effects that royalty or people in positions of power have on society. It is also a story of how sexual self-control strengthens a society and how lack of sexual self-control hurts it.
Anthropologist J. D. Unwin studied the sexual behaviors of eighty-six cultures through five thousand years of history. He observed that when cultures believed that sex outside of marriage—either premarital sex or extramarital sex—was wrong and did not practice it, those cultures prospered and were strong. The societies that were more sexually loose declined and eventually faded away. Unwin theorized that it was a matter of energy. Energy dispersed carelessly through promiscuity resulted in a dying society. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin at Harvard found a similar pattern in his studies of societies. Thus there is a strong scientific link between personal moral decisions and the strength of a society.
Family Life and Society
How we handle our sexuality in a society determines a great deal about the stability of marriage and family life in that society. Many social scientists have found that unstable marriages and family breakdown lead to crime in society. Neighborhoods where there are many single parents are usually less safe than neighborhoods where there are strong marriages. Most criminal offenders are unmarried young men (from age eighteen to age thirty-five).When men marry and stay married, they, like the first barbarian, become stakeholders in society. They care about their families. They get into fewer fights, they drink less alcohol, fewer of them are involved in homicide, they keep steady jobs for the sake of their wives and children, they care about the schools, hospitals, roads, and facilities in their communities and pay taxes and serve on committees to make them better. They often own property and care about their property. Their sexual energy is channeled into building a marriage, a family, a home, and a community in which to live and prosper.
This is the significance of the story of the princess and the barbarian. Through channeling the couple's sexual energy into marriage, family, and kingdom-building, all is well. All are happier for the couple's sexual restraint.
When sexual mores are loose in the society, they contribute to social breakdown. Loose sexual mores contribute to divorce. Then children grow up in broken families, often with only one parent. This will have a negative effect on the larger society, because children from broken families are statistically far more at risk than children from stable families. Children from broken families statistically use drugs more, have more mental and emotional problems, are more involved in crime, suffer from health problems, fall behind academically, and are more likely to be victims of abuse. Children of single parent families tend to be less able to cope with emotional and social difficulties. Although this is not true in every case, they are more likely to grow up feeling insecure, neglected, and unloved as the single parent struggles to maintain the home while working full time to support the family as well. Such children are exposed to the dangers and problems of the world before their hearts have been grounded in the warmth and security of a loving home. Because they often spend time alone in an empty house, they are more likely to join a gang, which becomes like a family to them.
These things do not always happen to children from broken homes, but they do face greater challenges and have more difficulties to overcome than those growing up in stable homes with two loving parents.
The quality of family life is enormously important to society. Children who do not experience respect and love in the family will not know how to show respect and love to people in society. In an atmosphere of love, children can learn to love and trust, to apologize for mistakes, to forgive others for their mistakes, to resolve conflicts, to be conscientious and courageous, to respect the rights of others, to postpone gratification, and to be both free and responsible. They can gain the inner confidence to develop healthy relationships with many kinds of people.
We often think that our problems are caused by the social environment. Of course, it is true that social influences can affect us in both good and bad ways. Yet the family is the basis of society. When we find problems in society, they can usually be traced back to problems in the family. It is in the family that our personality and character are formed. We do not inherit just our parents' genes; we also inherit their attitudes towards life, their way of dealing with problems, and their patterns of human relationships. These are passed on from generation to generation.
The relationships we experience in the family are the models for our social relationships. Our societies are a reflection of our families, and our families are a reflection of the moral choices made by the individuals within them. In these ways the fates of the individual, the family, and society intertwine.
Lesson Plan Objectives
Cognitive: Students will understand that individual moral choices affect families and society.Affective: Students will not like the modern princess and will understand that more security and happiness came about when the first princess maintained her morality.
Behavioral: Students write a short story recreating in modern times the story they study. Students will compare and contrast the two princesses in the story. Students will compare and contrast the two princesses’ impact on the kingdom.
Class Session 1
Materials Needed: Pictures, newspaper articles, magazine articles, Internet information on Prince Charles and Princess Diana [or William and Kate, or another royal couple].Ask students what they thought of the story “The Princess and the Barbarian” in their student books. Even though the story has “fairy tale” elements, do they find a certain basic truth behind it?
The book cites some scientific research—from anthropology and the social sciences—that an individual’s moral choices—especially in the area of sexuality—do have an impact on society. Ask students if they remember any of the points made in the text and to share what they remember with the class.
Ask: “Is it only leaders—like princes and princesses and presidents—whose individual moral choices affect the nation?” Emphasize that a nation is made up of individuals, and is only as good as the moral choices those individuals make.
To make the point that individual choices affect the whole, ask students what happens to a school as a whole if some students vandalize it. Maybe it is only one or two students who spray-paint a wall, break a window, plug up the toilets with rolls of toilet paper, or scatter marbles in a slippery hallway. Still, isn’t everyone affected? Isn’t the atmosphere of the school affected? Those individuals have an impact on everyone in the school because of their poor choices. It is the same with individual moral choices in a nation.
Point out that the story “The Princess and the Barbarian” makes the point that the second princess has different morals than those of her mother. Have they noticed a difference between the morals of their generation and the morals of their parents’ generation? Ask: “What are some of those differences? Which generation do you think has it right? Or does each generation have some things right and some things wrong? What are those things?”
Ask students to look at the Questions for Discussion in their student books. Allow them time to pen notes in their books as to their answers to these questions. Then conduct a class discussion, soliciting students’ answers to each of the ten questions and encouraging students to respond to one another’s ideas.
Questions for Discussion
1. Why do values sometimes change from one generation to the next?
2. What should a traditionally moral society do when immoral ideas start influencing the youth?
3. How is it possible to choose between a moral and an immoral idea? What are the criteria for making such a judgment?
4. How does the breakdown of order in sexual love influence society? Is it a strict cause-and-effect relationship?
5. Why do you think most criminals come from broken homes or single-parent families?
6. How do an individual's choices affect his or her family?
7. How does a family affect society?
8. How did the first princess act to change the barbarian into a responsible adult? How did her actions and the result differ from her daughter’s?
9. The couples in the story happened to be the kingdom’s rulers. Do leaders have a special responsibility to set the moral tone of their society?
10. Why do you think the second princess rejected the values of her parents and adopted more “modern” ones?
Perhaps it would be interesting to discuss the case of a contemporary royal situation and its impact on society: Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Students are probably familiar with some elements of the story. Show pictures and share from articles about the couple. What impact do students think this unhappy marriage had on society? Did sexual immorality have anything to do with the unhappiness in this marriage? What about Charles’s subsequent marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles? Even though legally she will be queen when Charles becomes king, the British do not call her “Princes Camilla” and they will not call her “Queen Camilla” because of the strong feelings among the British people that her love affair with Charles led to the death of the beloved Diana. Did the individual moral choices of these individuals—Diana, Charles, and Camilla—affect their nation?
Class Session 2
Remind students that in the last class session, they discussed Charles and Diana, a more contemporary prince and princess, whose actions impacted their country and indeed the world.
Ask them to do the Reflection Exercise: “The Princess and the Barbarian Today,” perhaps using modern monarchs as their models.
Reflection Exercise: “The Princess and the Barbarian Today”
Try to write a short story transferring the circumstances to the 21st century: where is the “kingdom,” who is the “princess,” who is the “barbarian,” and what happens? Use your imagination to create a modern-day setting for the story.Point out that most children dream of being royalty at some point in their lives. (Actually, many adults do too!) Using a Venn diagram [two circles that overlap partly in the middle], do this as a class, comparing the older generation princess and the younger generation princess. Write the older generation princess’s unique characteristics in the left circle, the younger generation princess’s unique characteristics in the right circle, and the similarities they share in the intersecting middle portion of the diagram.
Allow students to call out characteristics of the older generation princess, characteristics of the younger generation princess, and the middle ground of characteristics that they shared.
Now draw a chart with two columns, the first with the header: Older-Generation Princess, and the second with the header: Younger-Generation Princess, and ask students to list distinct characteristics of each generation.
Ask students to think of themselves as the prince or princess of a realm. They are confronted with an attractive but wild barbarian of the opposite sex. What do they think they would do?
Exercise: “The Two Princesses”
Make a chart of the two princesses comparing:1) their values
2) how their actions affected the kingdom
Now think which path you would realistically take if you were to find yourself in their situation (if you are male, let the barbarian be a female). To do this, you have to reflect on your own character and values.